Heather Blease and the art of starting again

A soundproof vault with a red telephone is an unusual neighbour for a customer-service desk. In 2016, Heather D. Blease had one just steps from her office. The Cold War relic belonged to the former Brunswick Naval Air Station, a place she had known from the outside while growing up in town. Now she was building a business inside it. The Navy had left. There were other calls to answer.

Blease founded SaviLinx at Brunswick Landing in 2013. She had already built a Maine technical-support company, watched major work move overseas, and lived through its bankruptcy. Returning to the same industry demanded a fairly pointed question: what would she change? Her answer began with the customers she wanted, the equipment she would avoid buying, and the government rules governing the ground beneath her feet.

Before the vault, folding chairs

Her first company, EnvisioNet, opened in Augusta in March 1995 with four people, folding furniture and a $70,000 bank loan. The opening-day refreshments were doughnuts, champagne and orange juice. That is a respectable menu for celebrating a future nobody can yet afford.

She came to entrepreneurship through electrical engineering. After graduating from the University of Maine in 1985, she worked at Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts and later Augusta. Uncertainty about the Augusta operation helped push her toward running her own technical-support business.

Engineering had been a practical choice, encouraged by her father, rather than the obvious extension of her favourite classes. She had enjoyed art and gym. At university, finishing the degree became a matter of proving she could do it. That history adds some texture to the title of engineer: the qualification required persistence before it supplied a career.

EnvisioNet grew into a substantial Maine employer, serving clients including Microsoft and Dell. Blease was named Maine's Economic Developer of the Year in 1999. She had found a way to connect the expanding technology industry with people who could explain its products over the telephone. For a while, the demand seemed to keep arriving.

Then major clients shifted work offshore. EnvisioNet entered Chapter 11 in 2001 and was sold. The consequences reached beyond the company: having personally guaranteed business debt, Blease later filed for personal bankruptcy. The distinction matters. A business can disappear from its founder's working day and remain very much present in her finances.

The second attempt had different customers

When Blease launched SaviLinx, she was explicit about the change in her thinking. “Much of what’s different is what’s inside my head,” she said in 2013. The work would look familiar: trained people resolving questions for someone else's customers. The commercial structure would be different.

She was targeting federal contracts, which she described at the time as typically lasting five to seven years. Their domestic service requirements offered a different prospect from the offshore shifts that had damaged EnvisioNet. Federal spending had its own uncertainties, which she acknowledged. She was choosing a market with a different set of risks.

The equipment bill changed, too. At EnvisioNet, a telephone switch could require $1 million to $2 million upfront. SaviLinx would use cloud-based software paid for as an operating expense. That reduced the hardware hurdle to taking on work. Hiring and training people would determine how quickly the company could get moving.

The federal strategy also took her a considerable distance from home. SaviLinx's first government contract in 2014 required employees in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. With help from the local WIN Job Center, the company hired and trained an initial group of 30. By October 2016, its Hattiesburg workforce exceeded 200.

Blease kept building there because she had a trained team whose work was bringing further business. The company used Pearl River Community College's Woodall Technology Center for larger training sessions. Its growing operation mixed remote work with a local office for administration, training and coaching. A Maine company was learning to belong somewhere else.

The boundary on the map

Back in Brunswick, locating at a former military base presented an awkward puzzle. The federal HUBZone programme was intended to direct contracting opportunities toward businesses in economically disadvantaged areas. Eligibility involved both the business location and where a share of its employees lived.

In a December 2012 letter to Senator Susan Collins, Blease explained the problem. The former base contained few homes, yet the rule required 35 percent of employees to live within the designated area. A place could have room for a business and very little room for its workforce.

Her proposed remedy was to include the surrounding community. The letter entered the Congressional Record in January 2013. By 2015, her experience was being cited in the Senate's discussion of changes to the programme. She had taken a practical obstacle in a business plan and made it legible to lawmakers.

SaviLinx received HUBZone certification in March 2017. There is a less glamorous kind of entrepreneurial work in that sequence: reading eligibility rules, identifying why they fail in practice, and persisting through the process of getting them changed. The result was a credential with consequences for which contracts the company could pursue.

A large number, a small warning

By 2016, SaviLinx had more than $11 million in annual revenue. The following year it placed No. 28 on the Inc. 5000, reporting 9,264 percent revenue growth between 2013 and 2016. The number measures a particular three-year interval from the company's founding year. It is an arresting result; it is also a historical one.

The recognition continued. Blease received the U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce Growth Master Award in 2017, recognising government-sector growth. Mainebiz named her a Woman to Watch in 2021. SaviLinx joined the Women Presidents Organization's 50 fastest-growing women-owned or led companies list in 2022, and marked a seventh consecutive Inc. 5000 appearance in 2023.

Her own explanation of growth was more guarded than a trophy shelf might suggest. In 2018 she described profitability as central to her decisions and warned against opportunities that would undermine commitments to existing customers. “Not all growth is good,” she wrote. Experience had given her a reason to inspect an attractive opportunity's underside.

“Not all growth is good.”

Heather Blease, 2018

She also argued for examining financing options before selling ownership. Her account included redevelopment-agency loans, state financing resources, and repeated use of her retirement savings. Keeping equity involved real personal commitments. The advice came from someone who had needed money for payroll.

The people inside the performance numbers

Growth eventually comes down to someone learning the work. In 2017, a customer's suggestion for a reward-based learning scheme became SaviLinx University. Rather than restrict it to that customer's team, the company extended the opportunity across its agents.

Andrea Georgian, its staff and community engagement manager, led the programme's development. Lessons included Microsoft Office skills and email etiquette, alongside opportunities for community volunteering. Knowing when to reply to everyone may sound modest beside a national growth ranking. Anyone who has survived an enthusiastic reply-all chain can appreciate the contribution.

Blease's approach to measurement had a similarly practical streak. She described a monthly client scorecard that included a category for improvements beyond the routine service measures. Ideas often came from agents closest to callers. Daily conversations with those agents helped turn observations into changes.

Agents could also see their own performance data in real time. That gave them a way to judge their work while it was happening. Her account connects two habits that can easily drift apart: listening to employees and measuring their results. The people answering the questions were also expected to notice how the operation could work better.

Expansion reached northern Maine in October 2020, when SaviLinx opened in Caribou. It initially hired about 50 full-time employees; by June 2021 the local workforce had grown to around 70. For Blease, the choice of location was part of the purpose. She has described targeting recruitment and facilities in communities affected by economic adversity.

Someone still has to answer

In 2022, Blease explained her view of the caller's predicament in a short video. People contact a company or an agency because something needs solving. If automated systems have failed them, the eventual conversation with a person carries the unfinished business of everything that came before it.

That gives her engineering background an enduring relevance. A helpful exchange depends on what sits behind it: information, training, technology, staffing and a route to an answer. A polite voice can do only so much with an unworkable process. Blease's business has to attend to both.

She remains involved in that machinery. In January 2025, SaviLinx announced Mike Wilson as vice president of operations and John Matusiewicz as vice president of information technology. In September, Blease joined client-experience executive Katie Michael at the National Association of State Workforce Agencies summit in Dallas, where the agenda included public employment services and programme operations.

In 2026, she exhibited at a rural broadband conference alongside her children Elsa and Alden. She has described the pleasure of working with them. The founder's calendar still involves new rooms, new customers and the logistics of showing up together.

Brunswick supplies a pleasing final detail. The company has two office cats, Savi and Linx. An enterprise built around human attention has made some accommodation for feline supervision. Outside, the former naval base has its next life. Inside, Blease continues a familiar piece of work with a revised set of assumptions: assemble the people, make the arrangements, answer the call.